Not to have realised until now that Joey Maynard’s ‘displaced organ’ was a prolapse?

[QuaterMiss]

I know there is or was an enormous Chalet School thread but I can’t spend six weeks trawling through that.

Fascinated to note (because I’ve been reading the complete synopses how all the CS women taken seriously ill either went straight to the San or journeyed - over days - for a consultation with Sir James Talbot. It was he who diagnosed said ‘displaced organ’. At which point Joey had iirc nine children. May be wrong, lost count.

(I read and reread the entire series over my first three decades.)

How do I get them onto calibre? It connected to dropbox then did nothing.

You need to download them from Dropbox. I created a folder for chalet school books and put them all in there so they were easy to find.

This is a pretty good guide but there are plenty of tutorials online
www.labnol.org/software/convert-epub-to-mobi-kindle/21263/

Thank you!

Has anyone noticed how much sneaky drugging there is. Matron and the doctors are always slipping sleeping drugs into people’s drinks. Not just the children either. I would be furious if someone did that to me.

Yep, Jem, Jack and Matey are all fond of slipping things into the milk. Even Jo, recipient of much Special Milk, doses someone with it, I think it’s Jane Carew when her parents are in a car crash.
I just finished The Wrong Chalet School. A girl is nearly expelled for reading Gone With The Wind but not punished for locking another girl in a room and lying about it? Wtf!

Ah, but she punished herself by having a screaming meltdown about Blossom bleeding to death!

I feel sorry for Blossom, getting told off for obeying an order. What was she supposed to do?

At least Blossom wasn’t blamed for breaking the window!
It always amuses me how tears are not tolerated at the Chalet School. You’re close to being expelled, your entire family might have been wiped out, or you’ve narrowly avoided dying in the lake/in a fire/falling down a well or whatever, but matey or a no nonsense mistress will wipe your face with a wet flannel and tell you to pull yourself together sharp-ish else you’ll have a nervous breakdown.
Then off you go to bed in the san for a couple of days with a glass of special milk and bingo, you’re right as rain!

Matey: "What's that, your leg's been ripped off by a rabid St Bernard? Stop crying and drink your milk, you spineless jellyfish."

Unless you’re Robin of course. In which case you can cry hysterically because you got told off then everyone will panic in case you die of the crying.
No special milk for you Robin. We’ll just ensure everything goes your way always.

I wonder if I could get away with special milk 😄 I know you are hysterical because your sister looked at your new Lego but come and have a nice glass of special milk

I noticed in a couple of books... Chicken Pox. Was it worse then? It seems to require a few weeks in bed.
Scarlet fever was another big fuss. I know antibiotics solve it quickly now (DDs caught it a couple of months ago, I had never heard of it in a modern sense, but it's just antibiotics and 24hrs off school).

I don't know much about antibiotics and availability thereof in the time of the Chalet School, but I can imagine that chicken pox treatment wasn't as advanced as it is now. I mean, Phil has polio and that disease has almost been eradicated in Europe. When I was a kid in the early '90s, I had chicken pox and I think I was off school for a week.

@Flurgle the bit about Robin supposedly having a relapse because of Joey not coming home in Eustacia always bothered me. If Robin's so fucking delicate that worrying about Joey is going to make her seriously ill, she should never have gone on the trip in the first place.

Complications of chicken pox still kill more children each year in the UK than meningitis.

Someone had cowpox in one of the books I read recently. Think it was possibly in Jane. There was a smallpox epidemic and they thought it was that but it turned out to be cowpox!

Antibiotics weren’t widely available until the late 1940s that’s why TB was so deadly. These days it still pretty nasty even with antibiotics. Scarlet fever wouldn’t have been a quick fix.

Chickenpox can still be pretty nasty but in a world where going out in the rain without a hat leads inevitably to double pneumonia and pleurisy it’s easy to see chickenpox needing two weeks in bed. 😂😂

I wonder what happened to all the doctors at the sanatorium after antibiotics? No more cushy jobs with easy access to marriageable schoolgirls.

Thank you to everyone who made it possible to read the books again. I read and reread them as a teenager and it’s been very strange reading them 30 years later. Half remembered ghosts that suddenly pop out of my memory - baking soda remedies for tongues burn on chestnuts?!

One thing that I’m struggling with is that my “mental picture” of what’s going on is a new, adult one, and not the same, comforting one that I had before. It’s a bit jarring [excited about adventures of the Klu Klux Klan?!], and my suspension of belief needs a bit of work. But as a pp said - these books were written in another time for teenage girls, not modern adult women.

Just finished Princess and starting on Head Girl... I have perfect light reading for the summer holidays all stacked up.

Re-reading for the umpteenth time it’s not suspension of disbelief that troubles me so much as a longing for variety. I would imagine that after writing a few, the Chalet School world became more real to EBD than her own - but there’s a quite punishing amount of repetition. Every time there’s a trip to a smart hotel restaurant I know exactly what they’re going to eat. Same for every single kaffee und kuchen. I just long for someone to order some sushi, spag bol, even a generic mid-20th curry ... And surely to God the mistresses must have got drunk on cheap wine just once in a while???

I know there was limited variety in English food right up til my 70s childhood - but the characters come from, travel and live all over the world. None of it seems to rub off on them.

Not just the food but the phrasing, too (though I think that’s part of the comforting feeling).

If one more ornament of the Lower Fourth shakes her mop of curls vigorously until they fly around her, before explaining - if she can! - just what she meant by her map of imports, to a teacher of fresh, trim appearance who will suppress her gurgles of merriment long enough to whirl down the corridor like a schoolgirl herself... well, I might start to need matey’s special milk.

How did they get their uniforms with clothes rationing? And their sweet rations...

Oh yes.

I’m in the middle of Kenya and Joey has just heard some bad news. Jack offers her the coffee she made for him and sends her to bed. After which we learn that he had slipped a little something into the coffee to ensure she’d get a good night’s sleep.

I. Mean.

Crikey, one starts to wonder when they were ever awake enough to conceive quite that many children.

Actually, maybe that’s not a train of thought I want to follow!

Good question.

Clothes rationing ended in ‘49 and food rationing in ‘54 (according to Wiki).

They were in Austria at the beginning of the war and removed to Jersey - thence to South Wales - is that right? (Etc etc.) Which volume saw the end of the war? And the gradual ending of rationing?

I’m sure I recall snippets in some volumes on the sharing of clothing coupons to make dresses - wedding dresses and mufti - but I don’t remember anything about uniforms. Were there special regs?

(Nb this poster allegedly read History, for a while, at a university that would have qualified for the Therese LePattre scholarship ... )

When one combines easy access to marriageable schoolgirls with regular recourse to special milk it’s actually a wonder these books were allowed to be published ...

Guernsey, Quater